David Mantell

Austria/Germany especially the CWA was the usual preferred gateway territory for Americans. Britain had a reputation for being full of shooters which apparently scared a lot of Americans, so said Lou Thesz who did tour here. Also Europe made a lot more stars in the lighter weight divisions which was a concept that ran counterintuitive to the Bigger Better Badder philosophy of American wrestling and American culture at large.

Wrestling in Northwest Europe had a more prominent public profile until Vince Jr properly got his feet under the table in '85. Between 1955-1985 American TV wrestling was mostly small local stations, often minority language. Most territories made their TV shows in front of 50 people in a studio - even the WWF at that point taped their shows in a converted barn in rural Pennsylvania. In Britain and France, the biggest national stations sent out Outside Broadcast units and filmed big house shows at places like the Royal Albert Hall and Elysee Montmatre and presented them as sport coverage of the top action. Wrestling in America during the terrirories era was uniformly despised by the establishment as vulgar trash. In Britain, wresters were invited to make personal appearances on Royal Variety shows and royalty and politicians were openly fans. In Britain Mick McManus publicly hung out with pop stars like Mick Jagger. In France, Le Petit Prince practically WAS a pop star minus the music and records.

and as for the money being better in the US, I've got two words for that: Nick Gulas.

Why assume the American big names were the World big names? I became a wrestling fan in 1976 aged 2. I first heard of Hulk Hogan in December 1986. I first read about Ric Flair in an imported copy of PWI in 1988.

Have bounced this over to a thread of its own:

(Copied from the WON HOF 2023 thread) Why the United States is automatically ASSUMED to always have been the Big Time worldwide capital of professional wrestling. Is it just patriotism/chauvinism on the part of American wrestling fans? Obviously nowadays WWE is the biggest wrestling company on the planet and it's American so that much is understandable. In the 1960s there was a good case to be made that European wrestling was as big if not bigger a business than American wrestling. Both British and French wrestling had prestigious mainstream national TV slots that would have been the envy of any individual US or Canadian territory between 1955 (closure of DuMont) and 1985 (launch of SNME). In Germany/Austria by the early 80s there was a fixed cultural link between wrestling and the big traditional festivals and a thriving early home videotape market for wrestling and a massive talent exchange with the US. In North America, NWA members were. ACTIVELY PREVENTED from sending footage to TV stations in other territories. In Britain and France in the 50s/60s/70"s, ITV and (O)RTF were cheerfully flogging b/w 16mm kinescope prints of their respective wrestling shows to TV stations all over Africa and Asia. In Britain, France and Germany, old school European wrestling culture lives on, at least at grassroots level. In the US and Canada, with the one obvious exception of New York Wrestling which lives on as WWE, all the old territorial wrestling cultures of the mid//late 20th century have been wiped out. Where small time wrestling exists in America today, it takes the form of a generic modern indie wrestling style. I would put it to you all that in the 60s, 70s and even into the early 80s, the centre of the wrestling universe was Northwest Europe, not the US and this helped smoothen the road for the popularity of WWF and to some extent WCW in the early 90s

That's odd. Everyone insists to me that America would NEVER have accepted someone like Big Daddy, dear me no!!! I always said that if anything the American public are less fussy about technical ability and he would have at least got over as an end of the night comedy act in WWF. You can have fun booking imaginary Big Daddy tags in the WWF - Big Daddy and Tito Santana vs One Man Gang and Butch Reed, Big Daddy and Sam Houston vs Akeem and Rick Martel, Big Daddy and Paul Roma vs King Kong Bundy and Paul Orndorff. The formula was transferable. There's aslo a lot of similarity between Big Daddy tags and those six man tags they used to have at the end of the night with Andre and/or Callhoun plus Dusty or Putski or the babyface tag champs/top contenders versus three of the biggest nastiest heels like Bruiser Brody or Bugsy McGraw or the current heel tag champs/top contenders such as the Blackjacks or Executioners, where it would all end with Andre or Callhoun squashing the heels gruesomly for the winning pinfall and fans could end the night happy that the men they hated had been thoroughly defeated and probably badly injured too.

I'm thinking of starting a thread asking why the United States is automatically ASSUMED to always have been the Big Time worldwide capital of professional wrestling. Is it just patriotism/chauvinism on the part of American wrestling fans? Obviously nowadays WWE is the biggest wrestling company on the planet and it's American so that much is understandable. In the 1960s there was a good case to be made that European wrestling was as big if not bigger a business than American wrestling. Both British and French wrestling had prestigious mainstream national TV slots that would have been the envy of any individual US or Canadian territory between 1955 (closure of DuMont) and 1985 (launch of SNME). In Germany/Austria by the early 80s there was a fixed cultural link between wrestling and the big traditional festivals and a thriving early home videotape market for wrestling and a massive talent exchange with the US. In North America, NWA members were. ACTIVELY PREVENTED from sending footage to TV stations in other territories. In Britain and France in the 50s/60s/70"s, ITV and (O)RTF were cheerfully flogging b/w 16mm kinescope prints of their respective wrestling shows to TV stations all over Africa and Asia. In Britain, France and Germany, old school European wrestling culture lives on, at least at grassroots level. In the US and Canada, with the one obvious exception of New York Wrestling which lives on as WWE, all the old territorial wrestling cultures of the mid//late 20th century have been wiped out. Where small time wrestling exists in America today, it takes the form of a generic modern indie wrestling style. I would put it to you all that in the 60s, 70s and even into the early 80s, the centre of the wrestling universe was Northwest Europe, not the US and this helped smoothen the road for the popularity of WWF and to some extent WCW in the early 90s

Well I've never paid much attention to the HOF, so I don''t know. They were all fairly legendary in their different ways. George Kidd massively developed the art of technical wrestling especially defensive/counter wrestling (something sorely lacking in American-style wrestling), he managed to make a World Lightweight title a draw in spite of all received wisdom and between them he and Johnny Saint kept that title a draw for nearly half a century. Of the other three only Kendo was particularly a great technical wrestler- when he wanted to be, mainly in round one of his 1970s bouts.In the ring he was a Terry Funk like character, a guy who was trained to be a scientific marvel but found his niche in violent dirty wrestling. Much like Terry Funk during his Flair feud/USWA/ECW/Chainsaw Charlie years, he blossomed and ripened with age, having some of his best years as a controversial heat drawing heel (albeit with a significant col heel following) during All Star's two years on ITV and even more so in ASW's post-TV boom period when his violent battles with Rocco etc were blowing Joint Promotions/Big Daddy out of the water and confirming All Star's overtaking of Joint as dominant UK promotion, a title it still holds in 2023. Mention has to be made also of his powerful ring entrance in Kendo helmet, cape and sword, a combination of Darth Vader and Ax & Smash of Demolition. Ironically Kendo didn't just destroy Big Daddy but he made him also as it was their mid 70s feud, after Daddy pulled off his mask on TV in 1975, starting a feud that was the prototype for Daddy's feuds with Haystacks and Mighty John Quinn. Obviously Big Daddy was no technical wrestler. Contrary to popular opinion, he did know how to sell and work on the defensive as some surviving bouts from 75-78 attest.It was Max Crabtree who deliberately booked his brother as an unstoppable juggernaut that moved down all opposition heels. A force of nature. He was a household name with particular appeal to the child/family audience and kept at least some of that drawing power until his Dec 1993 retirement. Ultimately however he alienated much of the locker room and adult fans alike with the way the entire scene was subverted to putting him over with heels all being humiliatingly mown down by him and blue-eyes (faces) having to be rescued by him, that both defected in droves to opposition All Star.to the point where they took over the territory and held onto it to this day. Pallo is usually thought of as joined at the hip with his heel Vs heel nemesis Mick McManus.An arrogant cocky smug heel who sometimes treated the thin line between that and being actually quite a loveable rogue, a cheeky chappie who people might actually have liked if not that what he was being cheeky about was grossly violating the rules and taunting and harassing ringside fans. His charisma got him a lot of showbiz work outside wrestling.

I would have a lot of support for Kidd - the only drawback is that there is little or any representative footage of him in circulation that we can watch. Of the three bouts we have, all from the final months of his career, only this quick squash gives a hint of the man's genius - and even then it's like saying that you understand what Johnny Saint is all about purely on the basis of watching his matches against Mike Quackenbush for Chickara in 2011. Hopefully one day Granada TV will open up its archive of 1960s kinescopes and we will get to see Kidd properly, (plus a whole bunch of the Wigan Snakepit crowd like Billy Joyce, pre-America Billy Robinson, Tommy "Jack Dempsey" Moore, Ernie Riley etc)

The flipside- an actual WoS matchup transplanted to Antenne 2 and the French ring:

Les Catcheurs Francais au Royamme Unis.

I'll have a look when I can get on a non-work computer that doesn't block blogspot. or non death. I go to All Star shows and am subbed to Rumble's YT channel so keenly follow the present state of old school Trad Brit and enjoy modern clean technical classics, some of which I have shared to the British wrestling thread, so it's not just a matter of morbid interest in a territory's decline but active celebration of its survival in the modern era. Quasimodo wrestled here as did quite a lot of the top Catch stars including Le Petit Prince (on the late night midweek show Dec '70) Jacky Richard (Jan '73) Kader Hassouni (Cup final day '77) Marc Mercier ('87 classic vs Marty Jones - I remember watching it aged 13) Jean Paul Auvert (also wrestled Marty in '87) and yeah Flesh Gordon on Reslo so there's a fair bit of overlap between all 3 NW Euro territories. I'm a 49 year old Brit who was 16-17 in that time, started watching WOS when I was about 2 in 1976 after my grandparents got me into it while I was still in my high-chair and never stopped, started buying imported Aptermags aged 14 in 1988,went to Croydon's Fairfield Hall a fair bit and saw Kendo as well as Daddy and Stax in the flesh, saw WCW in December '91, saw Summerslam '92 aged 18 from the back of Wembley Stadium, carried on going to WWF and WCW tours 93/95 in Birmingham while at Coventry University, while popping in to the Fairfield Hall while back with my parents in South London during college holidays to see how things were progressing. I gave up on American wrestling after the end of the Invasion angle but have kept track of the surviving old school scene ever since and have watched guys like James Mason and Dean Allmark grow up and grow old. I did start buying tapes of British wrestling with CWA on and realised that the different national wrestling cultures of old school European wrestling were akin to the different territories of American Wrestling pre WWF expansion and resolved to learn about each countries' wrestling histories. I did make attempts to buy video tapes in SECAM from an old FFCP website and read up about the current scene of FFCP and WS and Eurostars . but only finally got to get to see a decent amount of Le Catch about 4 or 5 years ago when it started appearing on Youtube on bobALPRA's channel. Since then I found your channel and took the plunge into a wrestling territory related to but in someways different from my native territory.

I'm not saying PP and Saulnier invented all this, people were doing these for years before. I wish I could think of a better synonym for "gymnastic" to distinguish the French from the C21st "trampoline style" (Yonks ago. I hard-drived a match I found on YT from early 70s Montreal with Carpentier doing wha I now know to be a toupee on Maurice Vachon)

Anyway, moving on, let's discuss the French style of escape moves. which seem to be a lot more gymnastic than the British ones. The main counters for a wrist-lever, say. seem to have been the flying headscissors, the reverse snapmare, the standing somersault - as opposed to the rolls on the mat to untwist the arm. This was part of the style going back to the PP Vs Saulnier bouts in the late 60s. How did this come about and evolve?

*shrug* I suppose I "don't exist" either, but never mind ... And yes as you can see from any number of earlier posts, I am actually interested in French wrestling history, not just the later and modern eras, but never mind.

Well I want to know about it and what happened and how it evolved from the old days to the 80s/90s stage and on to the present day. I get tired of hearing the blatant lie that British wrestling disappeared overnight in 1988 (like WCW genuinely did once Jamie Kellner had his way) so I'm sceptical about similar sounding claims in this similar case and not inclined to follow instructions to Move Along Now Sir, Nothing To See Here. If other people don't like it being discussed, that's their business not mine. El-P, you've been very helpful and I'm grateful but who I really need to talk to now is someone more my age who grew up with this stuff while us British kids were into Big Daddy and Kendo vs Rocco, and whose first ever territory was the final 10 years or so of French wrestling and got their founding ideas of what pro wrestling should be from this and carried on going to shows in the 90s years after TV and has happy adolsecent memories of those days. A French version of me, basically. We'll see who comes along ...

My point re. New Catch on Eurosport was that those shows, like the Macedonia show, were a lot bigger and grander than whatever Varini says he saw (and they weren't all old guys either.)

Bernard Van Damme simply wanted to run as big and expansionist a wrestling company as possible, like McMahon (and Ted Turner wanting to show he could do it as well). And the Eurostars TV show, whatever plaform it wason, must have been accesible and doing well in Macedonia to attract a crowd like that.

For one thing, clearly not all French catch at that time was old men in an empty gymnasium. For another thing, I was 18 in 1992 and lapping up All Star shows in Croydon with Kendo headlining so I wouldn't generalise on the tastes of teenage wrestling fans in the 1990s. It does come up with some very amusing stuff though. To be honest, both the S&U (mis)quote and the old men quote reminded me of Alex Shane - as a babyface! (in the context, the term seems more appropriate than blue-eye) telling a crowd of FWA fans in 2001 that traditional British wrestling was "a load of fat old men in swimming trunks" and getting a pop from the Fin Martin-believing crowd. Something I've never forgiven Alex Shane for. So naturally I'm sceptical when someone makes a similar negative comment about French catch, one of British wrestling's two closest living siblings. I cannot help but suspect that he would have said the same about the early 90s All Star shows I loved. Or anything that didn't involve lots of roids and no reversals of holds. And yes, TV stations that either don't show wrestling or have stopped showing it do try to show wrestling in the worst possible light. I'll take your word for it that few people in France had access to Eurosport. It was carried on the Astra satellite which carried Sky TV which was the platforms for both the WWF boom and the UK popularity of the Simpsons, so quite a lot of Brits had access to it. Satellite dishes might have been seen as vulgar and trashy but plenty of working and lower-middle class familes had no such hang-ups.

“I remember the first time I saw French wrestling, it must have been in 1992, on Telematin. I was used to American decorum, very muscular guys, pretty girls, a sound and light show in front of thousands of people... There I saw two chubby guys the age of my grandfather trying to bickering in an empty gymnasium. It was the saddest thing in the world. In France, wrestling has the impression that it's the festival of underwear or sausage. 95% of the time, it's people with pitiful physical condition and athleticism who perform in front of 40 people. Since there is no control or regulation, there are dozens and dozens of structures. Among them, there aren't even ten who are serious, and even then, when I say serious, I mean that they manage to organize more than two galas per year. When they see that, I understand why veterans like Mercier are upset." Bear in mind this was while New Catch was on Eurosport if not still on TF1 and only a few years later Eurostars was doing that succesful show in Romania before a decent sized audience of young kids. It may be that Antenne 2, for their own twisted reasons, went out and found the grottiest old promotion they could find in all France to show the French public over their breakfasts how far things had gone downhill since they packed Le Catch off their channel and onto FR3 in August '85. No idea what "the festival of underwear and sausage" is, but we have some odd traditions on our side of La Manche too.

Not sure if it's still true post-pandemic (and what with there now being AEW also) but it was said of wrestling in the UK a few years back that it was the one place in the world, outside of a WWE contract, where a wrestler could make a full time income all the year round (although even in the Modern Era, many UK wrestlers still liked to supplement their incomes with Auf Wiedersein Pet-style ferry trips over to Germany and the EWP/CWP.)

Varini also mentions seeing two fat old men on Telematin in 1992 and being disappointed. Well there will always be veterans in the ring Le Petit Prince wrestled his last bout in 2002 aged 62. although I think Marcel Montreal and Jean Menard do a respectable bout here from a late 80s fancam. with Menard in the role of "Vieux Pontoufle" Miserable Old Man heel:

I didn't quote that bit but he talks of about 40 people attending (He also talks of about 10 promotions, most of which do 2 shows per year - so who are the other eight? Possibly Association Beauvaisienne de Catch et d'Athlétisme and Association Biterroise de Catch may be two of them.) The point I'm trying to make is that a show like this ... .... puts me in mind a lot of a closer to home show like this: ... about the same size show as a World Of Sport TV taping (the English show - which I was at - was indeed at a former TV venue, the Royal Spa Centre in Leamington Spa.) No US/Canadian old time territory - with the exception, I repeat, of New York/Capitol/W(W)WF - currently survives to anything the point of being able to run shows on even that scale. As for indie shows, I realise that 'how big is a US indie show" is like how long is a piece of string, but it generally conjures up images of a show like this: Which despite a physically larger room and the inclusion of a couple of Southern old timers (mostly from Memphis/Continental even though the show took place in Georgia) including Robert Fuller in character as his WCW persona Colonel Robert Parker is clearly a shabbier more threadbare affair with, on closer inspection, a thinner audience even if craftily spread out.

Thanks for clearing up what the accusations were and also the intermittent work payment system. I have incorporated some of this into the Modern Era section of the WP article. I have to say the 2022 videos of Wrestling Stars I posted a couple of pages back look a lot more respectable than Varini makes out - they look in terms of size a lot like a modern All Star or Rumble show in England held in a former TV venue (which in turn looks like a 70s/80s UK TV taping but with no audience on the stage due to modern health and safety regulations.) Not exactly Bercy or Wembley but hardly a mudshow either. In fact a nicer and just as full venue as the 1978 Mammouth Siki vs Daniel Schmid bout I posted. I know people in Britian like to yack on about how provincial and unglamorous the small town halls and theatres were, then and now. But there are THREE Old School Euro territories of the C20th (British wrestling, French wrestling, German wrestling) still in rude enough health to at least keep going at that kind of grassroots level. Anyone name me TWO mid-to-late C20th US/Canadian regional wrestling cultures still functioning even at that level, let alone higher? (Obviously New York wrestling, which lives on to this day as WWE, is One example but I struggle to think of a second one.)